The ritual worked. That is the most ghastly thing. I hold no particular brief for the rationality of the world, but that this vile obscenity should actually have the power to bring back the dead seems to me not merely a sign that the world is not rat...
Wandering is not limited to geography. Also an altered state of consciousness, it allows a disembodied self to drift on currents of collective awareness with minimal attachment to the physical world. This state of wander tapped imaginative faculties ...
I meant to text quickly, but it took five attempts to type with my thumbs. Ever since the time I accidently told Wick I'd stopped for cocaine instead of coffee and when Mel, my best friend, asked me to get a penis instead of a penis I lost my faith i...
Why me?" she asked, holding on to him. "Because you cared," he whispered. "You cared so much for your people, it broke your heart to see the pack in ruins. You cared so much for your mother, you risked your life for hers. You cared enough to save som...
I'd known since girlhood that I wanted to be a book editor. By high school, I'd pore over the acknowledgments section of novels I loved, daydreaming that someday a brilliant talent might see me as the person who 'made her book possible' or 'enhanced ...
I know my father blamed himself, since he is the one who discovered me pawing through his pornography in the basement as a child. Even then, I marveled at the strangeness of the women in the magazines, their hair feathered in a style I struggled to b...
As we stand there, it hits me how quickly everything changes - how life is like peering into a kaleidoscope, and just as you're looking at a gorgeous pattern you think you'd maybe even like to keep around forever, the colors morph into something comp...
So, why are you in Biloxi?" ... Bran didn't move, but there was a subtle change in him as he watched her. "I thought the reason I was here was obvious." "Do you mean because of me?" Asking that left her feeling exposed even if she'd made it clear tha...
public display and operatic suffering—an in-your-face owning of one’s vulnerability and fucked-upness to the point of embarrassing and offending tight-asses is a powerful feminist strategy. Writing is tough work, I don’t see how anyone can real...
Haskell to Quinlin You need anything, Quin, absolutely anything, you call me and I'll be there. Remember, friends help you move. Good friends help you move a body. Best friends bring their own shovel. You say the word, and I'll be there with a spanki...
It reached a point where the paranoia was getting to me. Everywhere I looked, it seemed like people were hanging out, wanting to date, hooking up, wanting to hook up—it was relationships, relationships, relationships everywhere. Guys checking out g...
Turner's openness is starting to become more and more appealing to me. At least I know what I'm getting with him. And I still need to tell him about Dax's kiss. That, and his proposition. I haven't had even a single second to get him alone since, but...
If you tell anyone what I just told you, I’ll call the Mob. I know some of them, you know.” “Bullshit.” I shrugged. “Believe what you want.” Finch eyed me suspiciously, and then smiled. “You are officially the coolest person I know.” ...
In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it ...
In taking that photograph, I understood something I will never forget: how I wished to arrest all the beauty that came before me. Not the classical beauty of symmetry and exact proportions or the fancy of fashion, which is ever-changing with the seas...
Coral, my love, you are too pure, too innocent, too alive for me,” he said slowly, almost carefully. “My world is like a drawing in black and white on a gray canvas, without a single note of color to bring it to life. And now, on this pale and me...
A brick could be used to stop time. I did it once at my uncle’s house, and I nearly wrecked the universe. He wanted to spank me, but decided not to, because he was afraid it would come off as pedophilia to all the viewers who were watching in mainl...
A blanket could be used to help you remember. You’re probably tempted to ask, “Remember what?” And that’s precisely my point—you can’t even remember what you can’t remember, and I’m here with a blanket to help. So scoot over and let m...
One thing I've always wondered—why did you enter that bikini contest when you were a teenager?” Her face flushed with a mixture of anger and embarrassment. “How far back did you trace me?” “Far enough.” A pause. “You didn't answer my qu...
Look, I'm not going to have sex with him just so he'll say that he loves me, you know?" ...That isn't why I was planning to have sex with Rob - to hear the words, I mean. I just wanted to get it over with. I think. Actually, I'm not sure why it seeme...
Words', he said, 'is oh such a twitch-tickling problem to me all my life. So you must simply try to be patient and stop squibbling. As I am telling you before, I know exactly what words I am wanting to say, but somehow or other they is always getting...
